The Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a decision that could only be described in three letters starting with W and ending with F, to give police the final authority to authorize strip-searches of people arrested for any offense. Broken tail light? Bend over and spread ’em. That goes for you too, Deadbeat Dad, shoplifting cat food granny and the rest of you guilty-until-proven-innocent 99 percenters. Bend over, squat and cough. Your body is the new battleground in the “War on Terror” and the 13 million of you arrested each year are now dungeon fodder play things for uniformed goons on the public payroll. Where once we asked for your cooperation, we now demand your abject humiliation. So if you’re getting any funny ideas about venturing out of the unheated comfort of your soon to be foreclosed upon home, whether it’s to drive with an expired license to the food bank, or more criminally, decide to exercise your democratic right to assemble in the vicinity of a rich person, be prepared not just for water cannons and rubber bullets, but a full-on finger raping by the ever lengthening arms of the law, whose weapons now perform double duty as lethal sex toys.
Your government (or whatever you call the publicly funded entity that exists wholly and unabashedly to ensure the unimpeded transfer of the nation’s wealth into the select coffers of the gangsters on its payroll and their corporate cronies) wants to fuck you. There’s no other way of putting it. They want to fuck you in the worst possible way. Literally, lewdly and above all, painfully. Think joyless dungeon master/camp guard giving your genitals the taser treatment kind of painful. You realize, of course, under your tormenter’s pleather gimp suit is some blandly visaged, pot-bellied technocrat hoping to be home in time to watch NCIS with the wife while you are left to whimper in your restraints.
Once content to “screw” you, or just fuck you over, our “elected” oligarchs have now upped the bar on their depraved appetite for torture porn with a ready army of doctors, soldiers, law enforcement officials and airport screeners to carry out their perverse handiwork. We can now add the judiciary at its highest level to this motley mix of state-sanctioned sex offenders.
It’s bad enough that air travelers have to submit a XXX-Ray or a rough probing molestation by TSA officials to ensure the absence of explosive contraband in their hoo-hoos, or that abortion seekers in some states are forcibly raped with sonic dildos. You thought that Republican presidential candidates making misogyny and homophobia the centerpiece of their campaign trail hate speech was reason enough to fear for an encroaching Idiocracy ruled over by a posse of evil clowns. Now comes the crowning jewel of a full-blown gulag police state in the form of a rubber gloved, raised finger salute to the Bill of Rights and all the other shredder-ready old documents that once served to pre-empt the abuse of power and provide the checks and balances necessary to maintain a republic. The vigilance of The Founding Fathers is clearly no match for the brain trust who brought us the Gaza strip, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay. That the puerile raunch one associates with ‘gonzo’ and straight-to-DVD ‘grindhouse’ porn now serves as blueprints for law enforcement and social engineering in the age of ‘Hope’ is just something else to choke on like a rubber gag ball restraint.
In the swinging, wife-swapping spirit of ‘bipartisanship’, five Republican and four Democratic appointees have proven they have bigger fish to fry than upholding some shredder-ready old document. By adding DWD (Driving While ‘Do-Able’) to the roster of punishable offenses like DWB (Driving While Black) law enforcement will have even further impetus to be discerning, heat packing meat graders deciding which ‘cuts’ to inspect for the mildest of infractions. Giving police free rein to play the Officer Frisky role in ‘Caged Cuties III’ is just one of the many (and hardly unintended) outcomes of a legal amendment meant to pre-empt civil strife in the event of more robust ‘Occupy’ or anti-war movements. Or should any of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” among the 99-ers finally realize that their humiliation will follow them to the grave and rise up, zombie style to snack on their former overlords as if they were delicious ‘pink slime’ school lunches. In which case, the Supreme Court is ready to rubber stamp into law anything to remove existing legal or constitutional impediments to a scorched-earth policy of zero tolerance to dissent. Constitutional safeguards like the 4th Amendment and all its blah-blah-blahing about unreasonable searches and seizures be damned.
What US leaders openly encourage overseas in the form of civil disobedience, they will not tolerate at home. An ‘Arab Spring’ for our colonial subjects overseas, whose dissent we can work into a neo-liberal framework and impose austerity and military rule later on. For American dissenters, even ones who express an anti-authoritarian bent with a broken bicycle bell, its a swift jack boot to the genitals.
5 Comments.
The four Democratic nominees did their best to hold up the Constiution, thank you very much. The blame for this terrible, awful, embarassing decision rests ENTIRELY with the five Republican nominees who once again put partisan politics over sound legal judgement.
False equivelencies like blaming the Democratic nominees equally when there was nothing they could’ve done to override the will of the majority are a large part of the reason nobody listens to the left anymore.
full-on finger raping by the ever lengthening arms of the law
I would phrase that as “arms of state power”, since I don’t believe that has anything with the Law. People that think the state justifies its legitimacy out of nothing might differ.
Whimsical still thinks his party is different that Republicans, how cute. Yeah, America doesn’t care much for rights anymore, its more about making things more fair, by making every persons life hell, instead of just some of us, its a concerted effort by the American Government, to make sure no freedom, no matter how small shall exist only in your dreams.
In his most recent column, Glenn Greenwald notes that “the Obama DOJ formally urged the Court to reach the conclusion it reached. While the Obama administration and court conservatives have been at odds in a handful of high-profile cases (most notably Citizens United and the health care law), this is yet another case, in a long line, where the Obama administration was able to have its preferred policies judicially endorsed by getting right-wing judges to embrace them:
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that in the interest of security, prisons could conduct visual body cavity searches of all detainees after they had contact with outsiders. For years after that ruling, lower courts ruled that the prison had to have a reasonable suspicion that the arrestee was concealing contraband before subjecting him to a strip search upon entering the facility.
But in recent years, some courts have begun to allow a blanket policy to strip search all arrestees.
The Obama administration is siding with the prisons in the case and urging the court to allow a blanket policy for all inmates set to enter the general prison population.
“When you have a rule that treats everyone the same,” Justice Department lawyer Nicole A. Saharsky argued, “you don’t have folks that are singled out. You don’t have any security gaps.”
As The Guardian said yesterday: “The decision was a victory for the jails and for the Obama administration, which argued for an across-the-board rule allowing strip-searches of all those entering the general jail population, even those arrested on minor offenses.” Civil rights lawyer Stephen Bergstein . . . “
Open the door! This is the White Plains Police!
But gentlemen, it is 3AM, and I am in my negligee. (Louder banging) Open the door, or we will break it down!
But sirs, give me a moment to put on my robe!
(Wood splintering) Don’t put on anything! Just spread ’em! We’re comin’ in! (Haw, haw, haw!)